Adaptec Serial ATA RAID 2410SA review

Despite the promise of SATA (Serial ATA) technology, some manufacturers have been slow in bringing their RAID controller products to market. 3Ware was way ahead of the game with its Escalade 8500 family and it's only now that Adaptec has risen to the challenge. However, whereas 3Ware's range extends to a 12-port card and LSI Logic offers the six-port MegaRAID SATA 150-6, Adaptec has only made a tentative move by delivering two-port and four-port versions.

The four-port 2410SA on review is a low-profile card, so it's clear Adaptec is aiming not just at high-end workstations and entry-level servers, but also at rack-server applications. This compact 64-bit PCI card comes equipped with a 66MHz Intel processor and has the same 64MB of cache memory as the MegaRAID. It also supports an optional battery backup pack.

Installation is straightforward. You can easily create RAID arrays from the BIOS utility or use Adaptec's bootable CD-ROM, which loads a smart Linux-based utility for configuring and viewing arrays, creating driver disks for a wide range of OSes, browsing the documentation and even loading a Linux shell should the fancy take you. For secure local and remote management over SSL, the card comes with Adaptec's new browser-based Storage Manager. This provides plenty of information about physical and logical drives from its slick interface and allows arrays to be created on the fly and new disks designated as hot spares or added to existing arrays. Error notification is particularly good, as you can send warnings to three email addresses and also determine what severity levels are sent to each one.

For performance testing, we fitted a pair of 36GB 10,000rpm Western Digital Raptor drives and configured them in a RAID-0 striped array for improved performance. We used the open-source Iometer application, which recorded an average transfer rate of 59.8MB/sec - virtually the same as the MegaRAID. Overall, Adaptec is offering a good-value bundle with vastly superior management tools, although the extra ports on the MegaRAID SATA 150-6 are a tempting alternative.

Author: Dave Mitchell